Nancy and the farmyard

This week and last week I was working on the farmyard section of the zoo. I have a bit of a love hate relationship with this section. I love the pigs, and enjoy cleaning out their enclosures and the small animal cages – the chinchilla, mice and rats etc; but I simply can not build up any enthusiasm for cleaning out the rabbits.

I think it would be fine if there were only 4 or 5 rabbit runs to clean out, but there are 13 of them and it’s one of those jobs which simply seem to take forever!

I don’t really have much in the way of farm news with which to entertain you. Here is a picture of one of the goats which I took on Sunday. He/She definitely seems to be the boss of them all!

One of my favourite animals at the zoo is Nancy the pig and I thought today I would spare a section of my blog just for her. Nancy shares an enclosure with her sister Harriet and I try and go to see them every week and take them some carrot (normally I pinch a bit from the feed pot if I have to prepare it, or give them some of the food which has fallen the wrong side of the enclosure. Because of this they both tend to come straight over to me, if not, Nancy always comes when I call her.

This week I thought I’d try and take a nicer photo of her and she decided that because I was ignoring and not feeding her or giving her a scratch behind the ears, that she’d put her feet up on the wall in an attempt to get to me. This is the photo I finally got of her up on the wall. She was less than impressed with the flash though but I quickly made it up to her with anothe rpiece of carrot!

Despite being a bit hectic, I enjoyed my day and also spent time helping to prepare some of the meerkat feeds. Unfortunately there seems to be a real lack of volunteers at the moment which means that some weeks there is no one working on some sections, which is a great shame. It also means less variation for me because the paddocks and farmyard sections are the ones which require the help the most.

For my final picture this week, I thought I would introduce you to another relatively new member of the zoo. This is Houdini, a baby Bactrian camel. I always look forward to saying hello to her every morning!

Cats at Paradise

I know that I have been particularly poor with my blog recently - in fact I haven't posted anything since I got back from Kenya. This has been for a number of reasons but to be honest it's just been difficult getting back into the habit of posting on a Sunday night after I've been at the zoo.

Today I thought that I would focus on the group of animals which I have yet to blog about at Paradise Park; and that is the cats.

Paradise Wildlife Park have a very large collection of big cats and for a couple of weeks after I got back from Kenya I was delighted to be able to work with them. Unfortunately this didn't involve playing with them as I had the lion cubs South Africa, but I did get to clean out their enclosures and prepare their food.

One of the enclosures I got to clean out was the outside tiger enclosure, while they were being kept in the smaller outside enclosure. I was warned not to go too near the dividing fence and to make sure that the broom was kept away from it as well. This made me quite nervous when sweeping the path next to the fence, especially while Narnia, the white tiger was pacing up and down and snarling at me as if I was going to be her next meal! Rocky the big male seemed less concerned and just waited patiently until I had finished hiding their dinner around the place.

I have to admit that I love all the cats at the park and it’s very difficult to just pick out a few favourites. The jaguars are beautiful and graceful; unfortunately I’ve yet to get any nice photos of them. One of my other favourites is the snow leopards. Below is a picture of one of them, right against the gate as we were trying to coax him into the inside enclosure.

Here is the big male tawny lion (they also have white lions in a separate enclosure) having a sleep in the sun.

Finally, I want to introduce you to the newest member of the cat family. This is Yazhi, a 14 week old puma cub who arrived at the park a coupe of weeks ago. She is so beautiful and at the moment is only slightly bigger than a domestic cat. I of course wanted to go in and play with her but there are straight rules of who is allowed in her enclosure. I did get Andrew who was one of the cat keepers on Sunday to take a couple of photos of her while he was with her in the enclosure.

I hope that you have enjoyed my blog post for today. Sorry again for the lack of posts recently. I have been taking pictures still so hopefully I’ll have some more for you next week.